Friday, November 22, 2013
Review: Get the scoop on creating a musical in clever ‘[title of show]’
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Welcome “[title of show],” the clever little musical comedy about writing a clever little musical comedy and no other subject than itself and the five people creating it.
To put this another way, the manner of telling by Jeff Bowen (book and lyrics) and Hunter Bell (music) mirrors the content, which in turn mirrors the telling, ad infinitum, like an image bouncing back and forth between facing mirrors. It’s a musical about musicals, a paragon of witty sleight of hand.
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2 comments:
[title of show] sounds like a very cool concept. I had to reread the article's introduction a few times before I understood what was going on, but even just the title definitely piqued my interest. It seems to me that there is a lot of potential in the concept of the show for a certain comedy -- good stories about "real life" are a lot of times able to hit home in a funny but true sort of way. I looked it up, and it turns out that the show did in fact have a brief stint on Broadway in 2008. I would definitely be interested to see whether or not the show is or was able to live up to its potential.
I feel like this is another one of those "theatre shows for theatre folk" kind of musicals. And while that isn't bad, I think it's incredibly hard to pull off. As usual, some people will be amused and some people will be confused, and if they're going for a niche audience that's great but it's otherwise a risky investment.
It's not necessarily "evidence that there's nothing original left to say", but if the material is such that only a small community to relate to it, I don't see such a show ending up on Broadway.
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